New Posts

I posted some additional conference presentations/papers on the Human-Robot Trust Project web page: https://sites.google.com/a/aggiemail.usu.edu/human-robot-trust-project/.

Welcome!

Welcome to my blog on human-agent trust relationships.  I became interested in this field of research while researching robots for urban search and rescue.  A comment made by Robin Murphy, one of the leading researchers in the field, that human rescuers will not trust a fully autonomous robot got me wondering what would be necessary for a robot to be trusted - especially in hazardous environments, such as disaster areas and combat zones.  We are beginning to get some answers to these questions now, as robots are becoming more prevalent in many settings: homes, factories, hospitals, libraries, and battlefields.  There are even some robots being used in search and rescue, but this does seem to be one application that is still lagging.

In this blog, I will be collecting my thoughts on readings, experiments, and current events related to human trust in artificial agents.  Although I am a roboticist, the trust issue is a broader one that would seem to apply to any "artificial intelligence" that people may interact with or rely upon.   Thus, I will not be limiting my discussions here to just robotics.  In fact, I will frequently stray into the arena of agents in general.  The posts here are primarily for me to collect my notes to support my research in human-agent trust relationships as I work on my dissertation for a PhD in Computer Science at Utah State University and to share those notes with my advisor at USU.  However, I would hope that at least some of what I write here might be of interest to a larger audience.  Any constructive feedback on anything I write here would be greatly appreciated.